LAPD Actions on Trial in 39th and Dalton Case : Police: Questions of supervision, excessive force and attitudes toward minorities are raised in raid aftermath.

Days before a massive nighttime raid on two suspected “crack houses” in 1988, Los Angeles police officers talked strategy. Capt. Thomas Elfmont told his troops he wanted the places “hit hard”--so hard, according to one officer in attendance, that Elfmont promised the officers “100%” backing even if they shot someone.

“He said that (such a) shooting wouldn’t be as scrutinized . . . as other shooting incidents,” Officer Diane Tostado testified in connection with the incident at 39th Street and Dalton Avenue in South-Central Los Angeles, a case entering its second month of trial in downtown Los Angeles.

“Somebody said shooting a Crips (gang member) would be the cherry on the cake?” defense attorney Barry Levin asked her.

“Yes, sir, I believe . . . those are the words that I heard at the (meeting),” Tostado said.

While no shots were fired during the raid by nearly 80 Los Angeles drug and gang officers, the 39th and Dalton incident became the city’s most flagrant known example of officer misconduct until this year’s police beating of Rodney G. King.

For the first time, details of the Dalton case are being played out in open court, with officers testifying against officers, detailing with obvious reluctance how four units in two apartment buildings were virtually destroyed by ax- and ram-wielding officers looking for narcotics.

The acrimonious testimony in the county Criminal Courts Building is not drawing a crowd. Upstaged by the ongoing hearings into the March 3 King beating, the 39th and Dalton case attracts no more than three or four spectators at a time--and on some days, no one watches but the jury.

Yet the case raises many of the same issues as the King incident--questions of police supervision, excessive force, attitudes toward blacks and other minorities.

Elfmont and two subordinates--Sgt. Charles Spicer and Officer Todd B. Parrick--face misdemeanor charges of vandalism and conspiracy to commit vandalism for which each could serve up to a year in jail and pay a $1,000 fine. At least seven other officers--most of whom were disciplined after the raid--have agreed to testify in part because of a directive signed by Police Chief Daryl F. Gates.

In the wake of the raid, the city of Los Angeles has paid more than $3 million in civil lawsuit settlements, including $50,000 for one broken pane of glass. The targeted apartments sustained damage ranging from broken walls and stairways to smashed toilets. According to testimony, shelves were torn from walls. A glass table, television, chairs, dishes, kitchen appliances and wall clocks were broken. Bleach was poured onto clothing and a dining room table was thrown out a window.

Police seized less than an ounce of crack cocaine and less than six ounces of marijuana. Although several dozen suspects were taken into custody, only seven were booked and no residents were charged with a crime, according to police.

“There’s no question there was a lot of damage,” Elfmont’s defense attorney, Levin, said last week during a break in testimony. “There probably was excessive damage by some overzealous officers, but not at the direction of Capt. Elfmont.”

Defense lawyers are trying to prove that much of the damage--including the destruction of apartment walls--was lawfully committed in a court-authorized search for drugs. Other damage, they argue, may have been committed by officers who were not charged or by residents who became enraged over the search.

“These people were mad,” said Spicer’s attorney, Michael Stone. “They came home and started throwing their own stuff around, breaking it up.”

Much of the focus has been on the police roll-call meeting three days before the Aug. 1, 1988, raid. According to Tostado, Elfmont expressed the need to deal with members of the Rolling 30s, a black gang affiliated with the Crips and believed to be heavily armed and selling cocaine from the two apartment houses. In a home between the apartment buildings lived a Latino family that was being threatened by gang members because of security lights the family had put up, the officer said.

“(Elfmont) mentioned their circumstances and about the threats of firebombing their house,” Tostado testified April 30. “The Rolling 30s gang members that sell drugs in those areas were threatening to firebomb the Hispanic family . . . because of the lights that they had up there. They kept shooting out (the family’s) lights, but the people kept putting them up.”

Also, two officers had been shot at by Rolling 30s gang members about a month before the incident, one Police Department source said.

Tostado identified Elfmont as the police supervisor who said the shooting of a gang member would be regarded as the cherry on the cake. Elfmont’s comments concerned her because she was unsure how some officers would react to it, she said.

“The way it was said, yes, it gave me grave concerns,” Tostado said.

Under cross-examination, she conceded that Elfmont never instructed the officers to shoot at gang members unlawfully or to behave unprofessionally in the apartments. Outside the courtroom, Levin claimed that Elfmont was misquoted about the shooting of a gang member.

“I don’t know where (Tostado) got that,” Levin said. “He never said that.”

Other officers characterized Elfmont’s address as a locker room-type pep talk. Under grilling by Deputy Dist. Atty. Christopher A. Darden, Officer John Caraveo remembered hearing Elfmont use the words “leveled” and “uninhabitable” in talking about the apartments.

“He might have used the terms . . . saying, ‘Well, go out there . . . hit hard,’ ” Caraveo told the 12-member jury in the courtroom of Municipal Judge Larry Paul Fidler. “He said . . . ‘Leave the place uninhabitable’; he might have been trying . . . to get our adrenaline flowing, to get us hyped up for it.”

Another officer, Joseph Delorenzo, quoted Elfmont as saying “something to the effect that if a Rolling 30s gang member was shot, it would not be a loss to the community . . . not (those) exact words.”

Elfmont, who is expected to take the stand in his defense, declined to comment outside court when asked about specific testimony against him, but did say it is important at roll calls to motivate officers.

“A Police Department cannot survive with officers who do mediocre work,” Elfmont said in an interview. “You need officers who give 100% every day.” His attorney added that “tough talk” is common among officers and is not taken to mean that laws should be broken.

Elfmont did not participate in the raid. According to prosecutors, the captain’s instructions were repeated by Spicer at a second roll call on the night of the incident.

Officers who carried out the raid under Spicer and other sergeants testified that they expected to find large amounts of narcotics at the two locations, as well as armed gang lookouts. Four police teams, carrying search warrants and battering rams, entered the apartments simultaneously while occupants and neighborhood residents were detained outside, some in handcuffs.

In contrast to the King incident, police radio communications at 39th and Dalton were on an unrecorded frequency, and no one videotaped the officers at work, prosecutor Darden said. Although a number of residents complained that they were roughed up and called racial epithets during the raid, no excessive force charges were filed, in part because it was nearly impossible to identify the offenders in the darkness, Darden said.

A key witness last week was an entry team “ram man,” Officer Charles A. Wilson, who was charged in the case for his role in damaging one of the apartments. Wilson said he agreed to plead no contest and testify against the other officers in hopes of saving his job and avoiding a jail term.

“It was my opinion . . . (after) the Rodney King incident, that no officer in Los Angeles was going to get a fair trial,” Wilson testified Friday.

In subdued tones, Wilson reiterated a lengthy account of the raid that he provided earlier to LAPD Internal Affairs investigators. He recalled fearing for his own safety while Parrick used an ax to break into a kitchen wall in the search for drugs. Wilson, who wore two bulletproof vests during the raid because of fear of gang gunfire, also remembered finding a suspicious packet of white powder in an unlocked kitchen cabinet.

He took the powder to be cocaine; it turned out to be flour.

“When you found that substance, did you consider at all that it might be flour?” prosecutor Darden asked.

“I considered it. I examined it. I smelled it and I came to the conclusion that it was cocaine,” Wilson said.

After discovering the powder, Wilson used his homemade battering ram to punch “eight or 10” holes in a living room wall, looking vainly for a cache of drugs. Several days later, aware that the case was under department investigation and that other officers might have used his battering ram to cause other damage, Wilson took the four-foot ram to a secluded street and allowed his patrol partner to throw it down a storm drain, he said.

Wilson later retrieved the ram at the request of Internal Affairs investigators. After pleading no contest, he was given two years’ probation, fined $1,700 and ordered to work 150 hours of community service.

“Did you consider the fact that you might be committing a criminal offense (by hiding the battering ram)?” Darden asked.

“No . . . I did it intending to protect myself from departmental action,” Wilson said.

Under cross-examination, Wilson testified that he and Parrick were conducting a “good-faith” search for drugs and did not, in his opinion, break any laws. Wilson stated that he saw no other officers destroying property.

The orders to tear into the walls, according to Wilson, came from Detective Robert Clark, who is not charged in the case. Clark, who took the stand early in the trial, has since declined to testify under 5th Amendment protection. Darden declined to say whether Clark might be charged later.

The prosecutor, who predicted that the trial could go into June, questioned the whole approach used in the raid. “That drug problem had been there . . . for years,” Darden said. “They should have had officers undercover making drug purchases--20 or 30 purchases. That’s how you shut down a location like this.

“They didn’t do a search-and-destroy mission. They did a destroy mission.”